Atlantic City
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out. A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon. While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.
A light snow was falling and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day. At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened.
I've been wrestling with this blog idea for a while now, and I'm still not certain this is The Final Solution. In a way, I kinda hope not; the last time someone came up with one of those, he ended up starting a world war. Oh, yeah, and the whole "art-is-evolution" thing. That makes me hope not too.
So I've tried various different sites and softwares, and found them all lacking. I've written in various formats about everything from personal problems to political ones, and have yet to feel like I've generated anything I should let anyone read. I've oscillated between thinking that bloggers are Self-Absorbed Wankers and believing that they are the Saviors of the Individual, neatly resting for a Planck moment on every point in between before throttling headlong to the next point of view. And I have, of course, come up with countless justifications for Why I Need a Blog vs Why It's More Trouble Than It's Worth.
In the end, it's like this. I don't have the mental energy to write to my friends anymore. My self-editing process is brutal these days, and by the time I'm done writing I've usually deleted everything between Dear Name and . Almost everything worth saying either hovers near the line between Pointless and Small Talk or the line between Interesting and Too Much Information.
Beyond that, I try not to Damn things by Naming them. Putting a concept, a person, an event in a box is the surest way to kill it. It's hard enough to talk about things without Damning them, but writing increases the power of the Names by granting them a permanence. Metaphorically, of course. I don't believe in any of the crap.
Of course, I try not to believe much of anything. My lack of belief will not affect it's validity.
Anyway, I've decided that the best way to approach this is to pretend it's a post-modern novel. I'll call it a stream-of-consciousness mostly-fictional narrative or something. This way, when things start getting weird, I can pretend later that I was just making it all up.
Of course, maybe I am.
"What exactly do you mean when you say the client died?"
"Everything dies, baby. That's a fact." Case looked down quickly. "Anyway, it wasn't my fault, you know? I wasn't hired as a bodyguard. And it wasn't like he was killed. His appendix burst. I wasn't even there." He shrugged and began to slide subtly towards his office.
Amanda wasn't willing to settle for that. "So where have you been for the last 10 days? I've been holding this office together by myself, you know."
Case glanced at her desk. He was pretty sure that pencil hadn't moved. The telephone, on the other hand, had probably been well-used. "I was trying to track down the painting. You know, the Dali?"
His secretary looked at him sternly. "Receipts?" she demanded.
Good lord, she sounds like a Nazi demanding my indentification. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, though, Justin knew he'd lost the argument. He fished some papers from his jacket pocket. "Here, it's mostly coffee and travel. There's a few more in my luggage, I'll dig them out later."
Amanda's face softened slightly. "Who am I suppsed to expense these to?" she asked vaguely, opening a filing cabinet. "I'm the one that has to explain this to corporate, you know."
I was so much happier when I was broke, Case thought as he made good his escape into his office. "Put it on God's account," he suggested. "I'm pretty sure this is all his fault." Case slammed the door behind him. If he'd realized now that God would in fact be picking up the tab for those receipts, he would still not have been impressed.
Yesterday, reality changed. You see, I was listening to Radio Paradise -- oh, excuse me, I mean Radio Paradise; this writing for the web is harder than it looks -- when suddenly... well, actually I don't know how sudden it was.
This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I had a blog, see. The kind of thing that you want to tell people, even though you know they won't care. It just doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd misremember, though. I listen to RP all the time, especially when I'm working. It's one of my primary sources of Brand New Musical Biscuits, so I glance down to check the track name a lot. I'm running WinAmp, but I keep it in the system tray so I don't fill up the taskbar as quickly, so I can't really check that. However, I usually keep a Mozilla window open to their mini-playlist, a page that updates the browser window automatically every time the song changes.
None of this changed. It's always far more subtle than that. It was the window title in Mozilla. You know how the browser displays the title of the page in it's title bar? Well, if you minimize the window that info is also displayed in the taskbar. Of course, if you use IE you might not realize this, as I believe it still identifies itself before telling you the title. Each time you look at it, there is a tome hidden deep within Microsoft's marketing archives named "The Semantics of Market Domination", and on this tome the gothic script of the cover title glows briefly, evilly.
Here in Happy Mozilla Land, only an icon separates us from the information. And indeed this is happy, because RP's miniplaylist uses the name of the current song as it's page title. And thus, it is possible to determine the artist and (sometimes) part of the song title with just a glance at the title bar. It's the sort of small interface touch that makes me happy.
Or at least, it was. For you see, it stopped. That is, it still uses the name of the song for the title, and I can still read it in the taskbar. It still updates automatically within a few seconds of the song changing. It just doesn't ever seem to update the title of the browser window. It makes me sad.
But the real question is, what stopped working? Was it RP? Why would they remove functionality. Mozilla? I didn't update recently. Windows? Well, I didn't install anything, but it is Windows, so anything is possible. Or was it me?
"It sounds to me like this guy has some pretty serious semantic triggers," the professor oppined.
Grissom heard him quite clearly, but that didn't always mean anything. "Is that supposed to mean anything to me?"
"Isn't that why you're here?" Wilson clearly looked puzzled.
"Not exactly." Now it was Grissom's turn to look puzzled. "I'd hoped you might know something about the symbol?"
"The victim's tattoo? Well I recognize it of course." The professor visibly relaxed, adopting a classroom tone. "The K is a Greek kau."
The CSI frowned. His hearing was starting to fuzz, a sure sign that something important was about to be said. Soon he'd hear the music. "And the apple?' he asked.
"Something to do with Greek mythology, some sort of beauty contest I think." Professor Wilson stared at the photo for a moment and shook his head. "I fear I haven't been as good to my memory as it has to me." A smile crept across his face. "Still, that's why they invented the internet."
Grissom continued frowning. He caught most of the explanation, and still no music. Maybe this was a dead end. "I need to..."
"Of course, of course," Wilson interrupted. "Still, would you mind leaving a card? You've piqued my curiousity now, and if my research turns up anything I might persuade you to listen to my crackpot theories on semantic triggers."
There! Finally a few notes. The veteran CSI frowned again and fished a card from his pocket. "I actually enjoy crackpot theories, off the clock. Maybe I'll tell you some of mine about bugs."